William Scott 1913 - 1989

Provenance

Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
Gallery Moos, Toronto

Description

Having returned from a brief essay into abstraction in the early 1950’s Scott had, to a large extent, concentrated for much of the rest of the decade on the still-life subject of his early career.
However, as the paintings developed, the objects themselves became less and less important, their forms becoming increasingly simplified and distorted, and their importance lying in their use as formal compositional elements. Freed from a need to keep the recognisable form of the object, Scott became ever more willing to use each one as a vehicle for textural diversity, either heightening a colour contrast with the brushwork, or in some paintings using the handling of the paint itself to delineate forms within a like-coloured background. Similarly the setting of the image could be manipulated, with the suggested planes of a still life composition becoming an equally weighted element in the image. In the present work, Scott has taken a single heavy and non-figurative form and brought it to life by using his painterly skills to give it a sense of an ancient object. Painted in a mixture of oil and gouache on paper, Scott uses the special characteristics of all three elements to create a work which is immediate and joyful, yet also monumental and grounded.